Beneath a Starry Skye
by Beloved-Stranger
Summary: What do you do when you find a girl tied up in the back of Gordon Walker's car? You rescue her of course, and get the hell out of dodge. And if you're clever you'll keep running...until you find out WHY this girl was tied up in the back of Gordon's car...
1. I'm not a stone I bleed just like you do

**Disclaimer:** I own nothing save the unfortunate redhead.

**AN:** Be warned, this fic is a direct sequel to my _Red Skye at Morning_, which in turn in a companion fic for MissAnnTropic's _Memory of Skye_. So if you haven't read those…you're gonna want to, unless you enjoy being painfully dazed and confused. Also, a quick flick through _Jo's Blog_ on Supernaturalwiki wouldn't hurt either, as some of the events there are referenced here.

If you have read the Skyeverse series, then all you really need to know about this fic is that it's a road trip of the female variety with girls going wild, moonlit rampages, gore, guts and gallant heroines by the names of Pepper and Jo (also known as Red and Glow) and that when the chips are down and the odds suck…it pays to have your best friend beside you.

**

* * *

Chapter One**

_I'm not a stone,  
I bleed just like you do  
__I'm flesh and bone,  
I feel just like you do._  
– Stellar*, 'What You Do (Bastard)' –

It wasn't an extraordinary night, really.

The Roadhouse wasn't overly busy or particularly quiet. Just the right amount of rush and still moments, Jo thought.

The clientele was the same as ever, too; the same eddying stream of hunters, hustlers and the odd bunch of rough-around-the-edges road trippers all looking for a drink.

Ellen served from behind the bar, cracked jokes and listened to woes, sent the occasional troublemaker off with sharp words ringing in his ears, and generally kept things going. Jo swung through the tables, clearing empties, delivering drinks to the pool players and the card ring, and fending off the inevitable advances from a few patrons too drunk to know better.

The sober ones hardly ever tried; one didn't get word of Harvelle's Roadhouse without also getting word of the little blonde who broke the fingers of odious George Fell's right hand and gave him a mild concussion with an empty beer bottle when he tried to put said hand up her shirt.

And yet, right now, one wouldn't know that this was the same blonde.

Jo was tired.

Not the kind of twelve-hours-working-the-floor-oh-God-I-think-I'm-gonna-faceplant-the-bar tired that usually got her, more the let-him-be-okay-let-him-be-breathing-oh-please-oh-please-oh-please tired that came from stilted, guilty grief and lack of closure.

Her mother had taken one look at her and sent her out onto the small porch at the bar's front entrance. Jo had gone gladly, taking her phone with her and hopelessly checking her voicemail.

"You have – no – new – messages," the automated voice on the other end of the line told her.

She pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes, taking one long, rough breath.

Nothing.

Just like yesterday.

And the day before, and the day before that and every day since September.

_Rick, where are you…?_

Her breath caught in her chest as she let it out and the night closed its arms around her. The faint chill in the clean air brushed goose bumps over her arms. A small breeze carried the smell of ticking metal from the cars of recent arrivals and blew about more of the dust that was spread across the porch from so many scuffed hunters' boots, dust that ground under her heels as she shifted her feet. She could hear the sound of night birds from the trees in the copse nearby, the muffled roar of the bar's interior behind her…

There was a lull between jukebox songs and for a moment…for a moment she thought she heard something else.

It sounded like crying.

Frowning, Jo grabbed the iron bar that lived wedged under the bench and got to her feet. She cautiously made her way between the cars parked in front of the Roadhouse and listened intently. There was Fell's Hyundai and O'Neil's glossy black SUV, that rangy Hilux of Calvert's and –

_Holy shit._

What was he doing back here?

Gordon Walker's red El Camino sat at the edge of the parking area, covered in road dust and with the cover drawn over the tray.

Jo's dark eyes narrowed.

It had taken her a while, but after Rick disappeared she'd realized just what kind of man Gordon was. He'd taken her on her first hunt…or rather he'd taken her on one of his hunts and used her as bait for the rawhead he was after.

Her mother had tracked them down and caught Jo just as she'd bolted out of the warehouse where Gordon had told her to hide. She'd been grounded for a month and, at sixteen and stupid, champing at the bit to get out and hunt ever since.

But life as a hunter gave no guarantees that that life was going to be long and fruitful…as evidenced by her dead father and missing boyfriend.

In any case, Ellen had set Gordon on his ass and promised to do awful, awful things to him if he ever came near her family again.

Apparently, Gordon thought one of two things; that he was smarter than Ellen Harvelle, or that she wouldn't come good on her threats.

Of course, believing either of those things made him monumentally stupid –

There it was again!

The sound of low, desperate crying came again, and – _surprise, surprise_ – it emanated from the El Camino.

Jo edged toward the car, the iron bar raised high in a baseball bat grip. When she got close enough, she reached out one hand and carefully began unhooking the cover.

She got about a foot of it off…and froze.

In the pale starlight she could see a girl's bare feet, ankles bound together with a length of blessed rope, the silvery prayer ribbons wound through the hemp catching the light. There was blood crusted under the knots, and one foot was missing two toenails.

Horrified, Jo dropped the iron bar into the dust and unhooked the rest of the cover.

The girl underneath it was a mess.

Her shirt was torn and smeared with blood and dirt. There was more dried blood and crusted tear tracks on what Jo could see of her face. It looked like a few of her fingers might be broken and there were multi-colored bruises on her exposed forearms. Her jeans were ripped at the ankles, presumably so they wouldn't impede the rope that bound her, and messily shredded at the knees, as though she'd been thrown down and forced to kneel on rough ground. In fact, that was probably just what had happened; Jo could see dirtied grazes on her skin through the tears in the denim.

Taking a breath and holding it for a few seconds, Jo cautiously climbed into the tray with the girl, kneeling down beside her and brushing the ragged mane of red hair back from her eyes. They were barely open, only crescents of white showing, tears flowing unheeded from their corners. She didn't stir when Jo touched her, just shuddered as she cried in what was evidently some kind of drugged sleep.

Stepping quiet as a cat, Jo backed away from her and got down from the tray.

It was an appalling sight, but that didn't mean that was an actual girl in Gordon's car. She bit her lip and looked back at the bar. There was no sign of Gordon, and the lack of yelling and shotgun blasts meant that her mother hadn't caught sight of him either. Wherever he was, it wasn't anywhere near either of the Harvelle women.

With renewed determination, Jo picked up the iron bar and made her way back to the bar. Instead of going through the front, she snuck around the back and into the living quarters she and her mother used when it was easier than driving back to their house in town.

The Roadhouse's small attic was home to the majority of her father's old hunting gear, where her mother could, on very rare occasion, put it to use or loan it to some of his friends when they came by. Jo knew every item of it like the faint freckles on the back of her hands and where they were all stored. She put together a mental checklist and went to work.

Just under ten minutes later she was making her way not back to the El Camino but the family Bronco.

She shoved her pack, laptop bag and a duffle that she had to take great care not to rattle into the backseat floorboards of the old Ford. Just in case.

That done, she took the first aid kit, a metal coat hanger and a large leather wallet and strode light-footed back to the El Camino.

First order of business was to unbend the coat hanger and jimmy the driver's door. She froze when the lock made a contrary clunk as it unlocked, but the only sounds were still the distant call-and-roar of the bar and the soft sobbing from the back of the Camino.

Jo winced. It felt cruel to just leave the girl like that, but the debacle with the rawhead hunt had taught her the belated lesson that nothing is as it seems. She'd be damned if she made that mistake again. There was however, the issue of whatever drug Gordon was using to keep his prey locked into a sleep state. If Jo knew what it was, there was a possibility she could figure out how to treat it…

A quick rifle through the cab revealed Gordon's first aid kit and a box of morphine vials. A box with lots of _empty_ morphine vials.

Jo swallowed hard, fists clenching.

The girl's state made more sense now; she was out of it, but not far enough to escape the bad trip opiates could deal out. Whatever horrors she had suffered, they had followed her into sleep and morphed into a drug-fueled nightmare.

_Gordon, you fucker…_

She put everything back where she had found it, but left the doors unlocked…for now.

Climbing back into the tray, Jo opened the leather wallet and spread it before her. Needles and small blades of every conceivable type of metal winking at her in the meager light, precisely carved evergreen splinters gleamed dully from their clear plastic packet and a vial of holy water nestled shoulder-to-glass-shoulder with a bottle of dead man's blood.

Her dad had put together this testing kit when she was seven, and ten years later her Uncle Shawn had taught her how to use it.

This wasn't something she was looking forward to. But it had to be done.

She pulled out the silver needle first, drawing it at an angle across the girl's exposed forearm so that the tip scored the pale, freckled skin and left a hair-fine graze. Tiny spots of blood bloomed, but there was no blackening that would have indicated a shapeshifter of any kind.

Next was a bronze pin, and no blistering, so 'negative' for her being a Siren.

After that a brass blade and the skin didn't start to dissolve, so she wasn't an evil, people-eating Rakshasa.

Iron and holy water didn't draw smoke from her, making her happily demon-free (Jo wasn't sure she could cope with something that).

Dead man's blood didn't bring the veins to the surface of her arm, which meant a big 'no' for vampire.

And, last but by no means least, pricks from the evergreen splinters didn't show a hidden face that might have indicated a Pagan God.

No reactions _at all_.

This girl was _human_.

Jo began to get _really_ angry.

She grabbed the first aid kit and withdrew a syringe of naloxon. In hospital and clinics they used it to counter morphine overdoses. A smaller dose augmented with chupacabra anti-venom would wake her up enough to get her moving and keep her from going into shock.

Jo tied off the girl's upper arm with her belt as a rudimentary tourniquet and rubbed alcohol over the vein in the bend of her elbow.

"I'm really sorry about this," she muttered.

In went the needle. Down went the plunger.

Up went the girl.

She sat bolt upright, eyes so wide the whites showed. Jo heard the cry struggling to be born in her throat and clamped a hand over the redhead's mouth.

"Shhh," she hissed desperately. "You have to be quiet! I'm trying to help you."

The girl sagged back, chest heaving. Her eyes focused on Jo finally, still big as saucers and full of fear.

The drugs in her system had blown her pupils wide, but Jo could still make out the rich amber of her irises, like thin rings of deep, deep gold glinting in the thin starlight. They conspired with her pale skin and fiery hair to make her look almost otherworldly.

For a moment Jo wondered if there was some other test she forgot to do, but she shook it away and pulled her father's knife from her boot, ignoring the girl's flinch.

The blade made short work of the rope and Jo peeled it as gently as she could from her companion's wrists.

"Why…?"

Jo looked up from cutting the girl's ankles free.

The redhead swallowed hard, blinking and crushing her eyes closed as she fought the drugs and tried to focus.

"Why are you…?"

"Helping you?"

She nodded.

"It's the right thing to do. You're not some supernatural man-eater to be put down like a dog." Jo ground her teeth. "Evidently Gordon's finally come off his rocker."

"You know him?"

"You're not the first person he's hurt," Jo muttered. "The best we can hope for now is that my mom finds him and keeps her promise to put a round through both his kneecaps."

When she threw away the rope and looked back up at the girl's face her eyes had gone wide again, although this time it was more awe than fear.

"What can I say," Jo said with rueful smile, "Harvelles don't do things by halves. I'm Jo, by the way."

"I'm Pepper," the redhead said. "Pepper Montgomery."

* * *

It was an exercise in terror getting Pepper from the El Camino to the Harvelle family Bronco.

While the naloxon and anti-venom were doing their respective jobs and keeping Pepper from shutting down completely, her legs were still having trouble supporting her weight. She ended up clinging to Jo as the two girls limped across the parking area with their hearts in their mouths, hoping no one heard them and fighting to keep quiet.

When they got to the Bronco, Pepper was shaking hard, eyes rolling with pain, her breath rasping hard in her throat. Jo spoon fed her into the backseat and covered her with an emergency blanket from the first aid kit.

"I'll be back in a minute," she told the rescuee. "Don't go anywhere."

"N-no fear of that," Pepper managed. "What're you going to – to do?"

"Gordon might be a rampaging psycho, but he's tenacious too," Jo explained. "I have to get you away from here, and I have to make sure we get as big a lead as possible."

* * *

Ellen Harvelle had become a hard woman because she had been given a hard life, but if there was one thing that could bring out her soft side it was her daughter.

There was much of Bill in their girl, but Jo had always taken very strongly after her mother, and as a result the two of them were apt to butt heads. The tension between them could be drawn out for months and come to a head in a spectacular shouting match, but after the air cleared you couldn't find two people who got on better.

When Rick went missing, Ellen found that her daughter might take after her in a way she never wanted.

Ellen knew she would do just about anything to spare her girl more grief…and Gordon Walker was without a doubt someone who would cause _both_ of them more grief.

Therefore, it wasn't surprising in the least that the moment he set foot in her bar, he found himself staring down the barrel of Ellen's favorite shotgun.

"Gordon," she said levelly, watching him down its gleaming length.

"Ellen," he returned, matching her tone.

"That's Mrs. Harvelle to you," she said. "You remember what I said I'd do if I ever laid eyes on you again?"

"I do."

"Good." Without taking her eyes off him she said, "Jake, Shawn."

The two hunters sitting up at the bar looked up from their drinks.

"Yeah, Ellen?" said Jake.

"Hogtie him."

Gordon took an unconscious step back. "What the hell?"

Shawn Connolly had taught Jo her Latin, how to throw a punch when she was twelve and been teaching her everything he knew ever since. Jake Reilly had hunted with both Bill and Rick, always brought them home whole and cheerfully bullied Jo into finishing high school. If there was ever a pair she would have let her girl go a-hunting with it was these two.

Gordon probably didn't know most of this, however, and even if he had it wouldn't have meant much to him.

What he _did_ know was that Shawn and Jake were advancing on him with wide, shark-toothed grins on their faces.

Shawn caught a length of rope Ash tossed him from behind the bar and Jake said, feral smile wide, "Hey Gordy, long time no see."

* * *

Sabotaging a car was something Jo had never had opportunity to try, but always wanted to do. Just to see if she could actually pull it off.

No better time like the present…

She crept back to the El Camino with the Bronco's emergency kit and a savage gleam in her eye.

First, she put the tray cover back in place and wedged a handful of repair putty into the exhaust pipe, then skipped to the passenger's door and found the spare key taped to the inside of the wheel well – _real original, Gordy_.

Once inside the cab she jammed the key into the ignition, grabbed a screwdriver from the kit, planted the butt of it against the side of the key's head and _shoved_. The key obligingly snapped, leaving its teeth behind in the ignition while the head fell to the floor.

Screwdriver still in hand, slipped out of the cab and locked the door behind her. With exaggerated care, she pulled up the Camino's hood and peered at the engine, biting her lip thoughtfully.

"Well," she murmured, "it's not like you actually need those sparkplugs, Gordy. Why don't I take 'em off your hands…?"

* * *

The change shivered over her like blood rushing back to a pinched limb. A faint breath of fever, the distant hum of her body reconfiguring and she was wolf shaped.

Her clothes felt wrong like this, tight and constricting over her thick pelt, but the constant pain of her injuries began to melt away a little at a time.

She didn't stay lupine long; there was no telling when her savior would come back.

Heaving a sigh, she slipped back into her human form. Cautiously, she flexed her renewed hands and drew deep breath that didn't leave her ribs burning.

She tentatively sat up and crawled into the front passenger seat to wait for Jo.

* * *

It took Shawn and Jake barely five minutes to truss Gordon up like a Christmas turkey.

Which made sense, really, what with Jake being an ex-rodeo champ and all. The man could hogtie, brand and castrate an animal in a hundred-and-twenty seconds flat (it would be a minute, but field castration was a little tricky…)

"Ash, watch the bar," Ellen said, and followed the men as they dragged the disgraced hunter to the back rooms.

Before Jo was born, she and Bill had had a notion to serve more in the way of food and perhaps a little less in the way of booze. They'd upgraded the kitchen and put in one of those industrial walk-in fridges. A cook was hired to come out and try to serve food to their shady clientele. It had worked, right up until the shady clientele started talking shop and polishing firearms at the card table…

Since then the walk-in fridge was kept switched off and mostly used as a holding cell for the occasional destructive drunk that couldn't be gotten rid of, seeing as how the door locked from the outside.

Now, it would serve as a place to keep Gordon until Ellen was ready to deal with him. She watched as Jake and Shawn pitched him in while she stood with the shotgun still cradled in her arms.

"Gonna make good on those promises, Mrs. Harvelle?" he mocked her, face barely off the floor.

Ellen smiled. "Please," she said. "I've got drinks to serve."

She turned to leave.

"You're just going to leave me here?" he shouted, outraged and struggling furiously.

"Your kneecaps'll keep," she threw over her shoulder and stepped out of the room.

Shawn swung the door closed behind her and Jake called out, "see ya, Gordy," just before the big steel bolt slid home.

* * *

When Jo climbed behind the Bronco's wheel, it was to see Pepper sitting in the front passenger seat.

Jo raised her eyebrows in mild surprise.

"You sure you're okay to sit up front? You can stay in the back and sleep if you want…"

Pepper shook her head, copper hair falling over her shoulders.

"I've slept enough," she murmured, "and I do feel better, really."

She looked better too; there was more color in her face, and Jo figured it must have been all the dried blood that made her wounds look so bad. It looked like her fingers weren't broken either, just contorted from loss of blood circulation when Goddamned Gordon had tied the ropes so tight. Her pupils weren't as dilated now, and Jo could see more of their extraordinary amber color.

Jo nodded and started the truck. "Okay. Let's get out of here."

"Where're we going?" Pepper asked.

Jo smiled. "I have no idea, but hopefully, that'll make us harder to find."

They pulled out of the parking area and hit the open road, dust rising in a ghost-pale plume behind them.

* * *

Ellen had been polishing the same beer glass for the past two minutes.

"She's been out there a while," she murmured.

Jake and Shawn exchanged looks.

Ellen scowled at them. "She has. And you'd think she would have come in where she heard you two scuffling with Gordon."

"True," Jake murmured, taking another sip of his beer.

Shawn downed the last of his and got to his feet. "She's probably taken the bar from under the bench and gone for a little stroll. I'll see check on her, El, no need to fret."

Ellen nodded and watched him go, the door clapping shut behind him.

"He's right, you know, Ellen," Jake said quietly. "Your Jo can take care of herself."

Ellen didn't answer. Since she'd laid eyes on Gordon a familiar creeping cold had been making its way up and down her spine; a kind of dread that sank through her nerves and left her fingers tingling with unwelcome sensation. She'd gotten it just before John Winchester walked in with news of her husband's death, too.

When Shawn crashed back into the Roadhouse her heart was already in her mouth.

"She's gone," he rasped, face seeming to have aged a decade in under an hour. "Ellen, she's gone, and so is your Bronco."

Ellen reached for the shotgun.

It was time to see to Gordon Walker's kneecaps.

**

* * *

AN2:** Reviews are made of win…


	2. Here I am, a rabbit hearted girl

**AN:** Okay, this one's like half the size of the first...but we're going for quality over quantity, right? Right?

**

* * *

Chapter Two**

_No part of me can be immune,  
Would like to be but still I bruise.  
Haven't got a lot to lose…  
_– Stellar*, 'What You Do (Bastard)' –

Morning found the Bronco in a stand of trees in the middle of an empty field, half a mile from the road.

Jo hadn't wanted to take any chances.

The girl herself was curled in the driver's seat under her dad's old leather jacket and just beginning to wake as the sunlight pierced the shadows cast by the tree branches. She raised her head, blonde hair a nest of tangles, and peered about with narrowed eyes. Through the windscreen she could see the sun rising, painting what sky was visible from behind the foliage with delicate, slowly intensifying color.

Pepper was a still but steadily breathing bundle in the backseat, Jo having convinced her last night that it would be better for her lingering injuries to at least lie down to sleep. All Jo could see of her peeping out from under the blanket was a skein of bright hair and one half-curled hand, a leather bracelet of lapis and silver around the bruised wrist.

Speaking of bruises…she'd done what she could for Pepper before they finally crashed some time in the early, _early_ morning. Mostly it had meant bandaging toes where Gordon had pulled out the nails – _God, I hope Mom rips him a baker's dozen of new ones_ – and butterfly taping the myriad of cuts, but Pepper probably wouldn't say no to a hot shower, enough breakfast to feed a small African country and a clean set of clothes that she didn't have to borrow from Jo's meager collection.

So, first order of business: hot running water.

No-tell motel time.

Joy.

"Red," Jo said, reaching over the back and giving the other girl's shoulder a gentle shake. "C'mon, Red, up and at 'em."

"Wass goin' on?" Pepper mumbled groggily from under her blanket.

"We should get moving. We've gotta get you some stuff before we really hit the road."

Pepper groaned.

Jo sighed. "I know, but once we get this done you can totally sack out and sleep the day away if you want."

Pepper groaned again.

"Believe me, I get it," Jo responded dryly. "But if we get going now…I foresee a shower in your future."

That got her attention. One bright amber eye peered at Jo from under a tangle of rambunctious ginger hair.

"Uh-huh," Jo said, smiling. "Now, don't get me wrong, sweetie, 'cause I'm not saying it to be mean…but you're getting a _leedle_ bit ripe."

Laugh lines appeared at the corner of that one bright eye, and Pepper giggled softly.

"C'mon, ginger-ninja," Jo said, still smiling, "let's get outta here."

* * *

Several miles down the road, when Pepper was sufficiently awake, she asked between jaw-cracking yawns, "Jo?"

"Yeah?"

"What did you do last night when you went off to 'get as big a lead as possible'?"

Jo smiled the smile of the eternally smug as she reached into the jacket pocket of her daddy's old leather jacket and set a handful of clanking, dull grey objects on the dashboard.

Pepper stared, an answering smug smile filling her freckled face.

"Those are sparkplugs."

"Yup."

"Would they happen to be sparkplugs from a nineteen-eighty El Camino?"

"Yup."

"A red one owned by an asshole called Gordon Walker?"

"Yup."

"I heart you."

* * *

Finding a place with passable bathroom facilities and hourly rates wasn't hugely difficult.

The guy at the front desk took his time counting out the wad of cash Jo handed him, eyeing up both girls with a greasy leer as he did so.

"Have a great stay," he said, handing over the key to room fourteen. He had the sort of voice Jo imagined eels would have if they could talk.

Oily.

She snatched the key from his hand and gave him a look that promised violence and lots of it. Her mother had been teaching it to her since she was three years old and she'd been striking fear into the hearts of men ever since.

It didn't fail now.

The guy looked like his balls had just spontaneously crawled back up into his body.

Jo stalked from the room, Pepper trailing after her with a small smile on her face.

* * *

Pepper had never stayed in a motel before.

She eyed the grotty little bathroom with trepidation, cautiously stripping down while the water warmed up.

Grabbing the bottles Jo had given her, she took the buddle of grubby clothes with her and scrubbed them up as much as she could, hanging them over the shower curtain rail to drip while she tackled her hair. Jo's shampoo and conditioner were a godsend…not to mention the body wash and razor.

She changed once, the beating of the spray covering the sound of her nails against the cheap tile. She turned her lupine face into the falling water, closing her eyes, letting it saturate her coat, soak her full of lovely warmth…

Then she ducked her head, braced her legs and shook like mad. Droplets flew in every direction and her pelt stood out in a cloud of brown and grey and russet.

She grinned, but gasped a little when she changed back, catching herself against one wall as she staggered. Her knees felt like jelly and there was an awful, acid-harsh pinch in her gut.

The change had continued to heal her wounds…but not as much as it would have if she'd been at full strength, and trying had put a further drain on her reserves. Pepper closed her eyes, took slow deep breaths.

_I'm just hungry is all_, she told herself, wiping away a few stray tears. _Give me a blue plate special and I'll be right as rain…_

_Fingers crossed._

* * *

Meanwhile Jo was sitting on the lone queen bed in the room, waiting for the internet connection and her laptop to kiss and make up.

The little cesspool motel didn't have Wi-Fi, so in order to send covert ninja-mail to Ash, she'd had to dig out her old dial-up cable and wrestle with the only phone-jack in the room…located directly under said queen bed.

**Loading**, the little Toshiba told her, **loading…**

**Done.**

"Oh, thank God," Jo muttered as her mailing account appeared on screen.

**Inbox (1)**

It was, as expected, from Ash.

_Ellen's out for blood. Gordon might lose his kneecaps. Where the fuck are you, Joey?_

Stabbing right to the heart of the matter then. Okay…

_I'm fine_, Jo wrote back. _Gordon deserves to lose his kneecaps. He's out of his mind. I found a human girl tortured, tied up and drugged in his car. I'm with her now. I'm going to get her somewhere safe. Hang onto him as long as you can. Try to keep Mom from killing him, please? And activate the roaming account on my card; I'm almost out of cash._

_Tell Mom I love her and I'll be careful._

_I need to do this._

She bit her lip and hit 'send'.

Not five minutes later the page refreshed and her inbox said **(1)** again.

_I told her. She ain't happy, but she loves you too. Roaming's activated. Good luck, Joey. May Hendrix and the Force be with you._

Jo swallowed and closed the lid of the laptop.

Pepper emerged from the tiny bathroom, damp and pink with the heat, her hair already drying in bright spirals. She settled on the bed with Jo and began combing it out, carefully detangling knots and trying to keep the whole lot from turning into a fluffy mess.

"What's up?" she murmured.

"My mom's got Gordon," Jo told her. "But I don't know how long they can hold him. He's got friends who'll start looking for him."

Pepper paused. Her hands were shaking a little. Eventually she said, "what about his kneecaps?"

Jo smiled. "Yeah, well…as satisfying as that might be for Mom, it's probably more trouble than it's worth. Of course, I'm not sure that'll _stop_ her…"

Pepper smiled too. "So, what do we do?"

"We disappear for a while, I guess." She looked curiously at her companion. "Pepper, what do you know about the supernatural? About why Gordon took you?"

Pepper looked down at her hands, the comb held between her pale fingers. "Not much, really." She glance up at Jo, eyes brim full of worry and somewhat distant fear. "I think…I think he thought I was a werewolf, or whatever, but silver didn't do anything to me. It confused him. I heard him calling people on his cell and then he went to the Roadhouse."

"To get information from someone there, maybe," Jo suggested.

Pepper nodded. "Sounded like it. I mean, I was pretty out of it, I couldn't hear the words, exactly, but you'd be surprised what you get from rhythms of speech."

Jo chewed her lip. "What worries me is who he might've been trying to meet. The Roadhouse doesn't exactly have the greatest client base…hunters, mostly," she added at Pepper questioning look.

"Oh," was all the other girl said.

"They're not all like Gordon," Jo reassured her. "It's just most of them've been handed a really shitty hand in life. It makes them bitter. Lil' bit twisted." She smiled ruefully. "Guess that makes us that love 'em a little twisted, too."

Pepper blinked at her. "What…?"

"My dad was hunter. So was –" Jo swallowed hard. "Is. So is my boyfriend."

_Let him be okay, let him be breathing, oh please oh please oh please…_

Cool fingers closed over hers where they lay on the bedspread.

"My dad's gone too," Pepper said softly. "He went missing for a week, and then they found his body on an old logging road half the state away."

Jo returned Pepper's gentle hold on her hand.

"Mine never came back from a hunt. We just found out when a friend brought back his ashes and his hunting kit."

She sighed and wiped her eyes. Pepper sniffed and did the same.

Jo tried for a smile. "Great way to start the day, huh? We better get going. Clothes or food first?"

Pepper opened her mouth…just as her stomach gave a gargantuan rumble.

Jo's smile was effortless this time. "Well, that answers that question."

* * *

For such a slight girl, Pepper could really pack away the pancakes.

She was halfway through her second stack while Jo was just finishing her first. The blonde watched, awed, as her redheaded companion steadily mowed down the stack, one blueberry delight after another.

Seconds later, of course, it all went wrong.

Pepper's head came up, eyes comically wide, and she said faintly, "Don't feel so good," and bolted for the bathroom. Jo was hot on her heels, and got there just in time to gather the other girl's copious hair before Pepper blew blue chunks.

"Ugh…" she said, afterwards, wiping her mouth with her sleeve and slumping back against the stall wall.

Jo crouched next to her. "Better?"

"Lil' bit. Oh," Pepper put one hand to her stomach as it gurgled cantankerously. "What the hell…?"

"I have a theory."

"Do tell."

"Well…when was the last time you ate? Like _really_ ate, had a full-on meal?"

Pepper looked up at her with woe-be-gone eyes. "Home…obviously, but…a week maybe? I lost count of the days. The drugs…"

Jo looped an arm over her shoulder. "Yeah…well, the theory goes something along the lines of your stomach shrinking due to lack of use and not being able to handle an over abundance of breakfast."

"Darn," said Pepper voice muffled against Jo's shoulder.

"Yeah. Okay, let's get outta here. This place reeks."

She helped Pepper to her feet and stayed with her while she rinsed her mouth out, then led her back to their table and ordered tea and toast for the girl's beleaguered belly.

"Slowly this time, yeah?"

Pepper nodded and munched with great caution.

Jo pulled out her old journal and a roadmap, and the two girls began looking for likely routes.

Fifteen minutes later it wasn't looking good.

"Fuck," Jo muttered with feeling.

"Definitely," Pepper agreed.

"It's no good, Red, Gordon's known me for ages, since I was a kid – and for far longer than I like. He knows all the places I could take you and he's an expert tracker." The hunter's daughter looked up at her companion. "Oh. Wait a second."

Pepper blinked at Jo's sudden intense scrutiny. "What? What is it? …do I have sick on my face?"

"What? No! No, I just…had an idea…Pepper, Gordon doesn't know you."

"Well, no. I mean we weren't exactly on speaking terms." Her expression clouded with thunder, ginger brows drawing down sharply. "He mostly just beat on me."

"And should I ever get the chance, I will most certainly beat on him. I'll set aside a sock full of quarters just for the occasion –" which got a smile from Pepper "– but what I'm getting at is that you're our wildcard, Red. He doesn't know where you would go, which places are significant to you, or where you have friends."

Jo smiled a slow, pearl-bright smile.

"You're gonna be our compass."

Pepper blinked in surprise, amber eyes widening. "But…but I… Jo. I've lived in the same little town all my life. I don't have significant places or friends outside of the bunch of kids I go to school with."

"Okay, but everyone has somewhere they wanna go. Didn't you ever wanna break free, get out and see the world?"

It was like someone had lit a candle behind Pepper's face, her expression lit up so bright.

"Yes," she breathed.

Jo leaned across the table, her own face shining with the same wanderlust.

"Pepper," she said, "where do you want to go?"

Pepper grinned.

"Everywhere."

* * *

**AN2:** And the pieces start to fall into place...


	3. Just another runaway, another runaway

**Chapter Three**

_Don't be afraid, take it like a man  
Please behave the same way if you can  
No bitter tongue will get to me  
And if it did I wont let you see  
Show the bastards what you mean…  
_– Stellar*, 'What You Do (Bastard)' –

Shawn Connolly examined the tips of the needle-nose pliers, glowing near white hot in the old freezer's dim interior.

"You know," he said to the man bound before him. "When something this hot hits skin, it doesn't _feel_ hot immediately. The nerve endings get a little confused…"

He twisted the pliers, the point of light reflecting in Gordon's wide eyes.

"It'll feel cold," he informed the other hunter. "And then the nerves will realize what's going on, but it'll be too late by then. At that point, it'll just be excruciating."

"Connolly," Gordon said, tearing his eyes from the tip of the pliers. "I'm telling you, the girl's not a girl. It's a –"

"'It's a fucking shifter,' yeah, we've covered that. Only she didn't react to silver, did she?"

"No," Gordon ground out. "But that's why I came here, man, to get some answers! You and I both know this profession doesn't always follow the rules! What if she's something we've never come across before?"

Shawn simply watched him, face empty of any expression except predatory vigilance. He looked singularly unimpressed.

Gordon kept trying though. "What if that thing's taken off with Jo into the fucking distance, huh? What if she's –"

"What if she's _what_, Walker?"

Gordon stared at him, fighting not to look at that merciless piece of metal in Shawn's hand, glowing like a malevolent firefly. Shawn blew gently on it, and it flared menacingly, lighting his face like hellfire.

"What if Jo Harvelle's dead because you dumb _fucks_ tied me up instead of letting me deal with the monster I had secured in my car?"

Unbelievably, Shawn smiled.

"Oh, Gordy," he said, some of that Scottish brogue spilling through his vowels, "Jo is just fine. Heck, she's probably halfway across the country by now."

Gordon sneered. "You don't believe that."

"Try me," the Scot said, taking a step closer and bringing the pliers with him.

Gordon lost it a little. "Ellen!" he bellowed towards the freezer's door. "Ellen, you know this won't do any good! You know I'm right! I'm the only one who can find them, who can save your girl from that fucking creature! ELLEN!"

On the other side of the door, Ellen Harvelle stood with her eyes closed, one hand clenched around her husband's favorite sawed-off.

Ash sat opposite her in the corridor with his back to the wall. His laptop balanced on one thigh while he picked at the blown knees of his jeans. He looked up at her, eyes clear under the froth of dirty blond mullet.

"She'll be okay, El. I woulda known if it weren't Jo on the other end. Ain't no one can sass their way into that secure mailbox of mine 'les I taught 'em, and Jo's the only one I taught."

Ellen nodded. "I know, Ash."

_I know…and there are people I need to call._

* * *

"I think I know why Gordon thought you were supernatural," Jo announced, standing with one hand on her cocked hip.

Pepper froze, meeting her eyes in the big mirror by the clothing store's changing rooms. "You do?" she asked, voice remarkably steady.

"Oh yeah," said Jo. "I think you tipped him off when you _fell out of your spaceship_."

Pepper blinked uncomprehendingly at her. "…what?"

Both Jo's eyebrows went up as she smiled. "Red, on _what planet_ is that outfit a good plan? Like, ever?"

Pepper looked down at herself then up at her companion. "What, you got something against paisley?"

"Ah, paisley, no, not at all. Neon green on the other hand…"

Pepper grinned back. "Bit much?"

"Lil' bit. Like, 'my optic nerves are weeping and trying to commit hara-kiri' lil' bit."

Pepper snickered. "Think I should stick with the royal blue?"

Jo gave her a thumbs up. "My eyes thank you."

They left some time later with two bags of clothing, Pepper wearing her new favorite out of the store; the royal blue paisley peasant dress. Two more shop visits later and she was wearing it with brown flat-soled leather boots that buckled over and the ankle and a light fawn duffle coat. She smiled at herself in the store window. She looked good…looked more like herself than the filthy, weak-kneed thing that Jo had pulled out of Gordon Walker's ugly car.

"Come on," Jo said, beckoning.

"We hitting the road?"

"Not yet. We've still gotta get you some stuff if we're gonna be traveling for a bit."

'Some stuff' turned out to be a hardy little pre-paid Nokia cell phone and a canvas satchel similar to the one Pepper had had at home, only this one was cream instead of brown and had a print of a running terrier on the front in black ink. Jo helped her find a matching wallet and put a wad of cash into it as they walked down the tiny town's main street.

"Jo, this is…" Pepper stared at the bills. "This is too much, I can't…"

"Yes, you can," Jo told her firmly. "I'll do my damnedest to keep it from happening, but if we get separated you'll need that to go places. Or to get home, if it's safe."

Pepper gazed at Jo from under her mop of vivid hair. "Thank you," she said quietly, and they both knew it wasn't just for the cash.

Jo smiled, warm and rueful. "Oh, don't thank me. Thank the very bad men whose Swiss bank accounts I'm skimming from."

Pepper's mouth dropped open. "What…how?"

Jo's smile graduated into a grin. "I know a computer genius with a strong belief in Karma." She looped an arm through Pepper's and they kept walking. "Can you think of anything else you need?"

"No, not…" Pepper trailed off, only having eyes for the shop window to their left.

"Red?" Jo followed Pepper's gaze. "Art supplies?"

"I draw," Pepper said. "I always have. Sometimes I paint, but…but I won't be able to do that on the road, I think. I…"

She trailed off again and looked beseechingly at Jo, who simply smiled back.

"Come on, Pep," she said, taking the younger girl's hand and leading her into the shop. "Let's go."

"Don't call me Pep," the redhead said faintly, a dreamy smile curling the corners of her mouth.

* * *

Back on the road again with no destination in mind the girls just drove for the sake of distance and dust in their wake, playing 'getting to know you' games and messing with the Bronco's radio.

Pepper found a stack of CD's in the glove box and began flipping through them.

"Rock Ballads of the 80's. The Very Best of Fleetwood Mac. Jefferson Airplane. _Barry Manilow_?" She turned a look of horror on Jo. "Tell me this isn't yours."

Jo flung back her corn silk hair, laughing. "Hell, no, I'm pretty sure it's Shawn's…not that he'll ever admit to it."

"Shawn?"

"Shawn Connolly: godfather."

"Aah…ooh, hey! Elvis!"

"You like The King?"

"I _lurve_ The King. If I'd been born in the right decade I woulda had his Kingly babies." She slipped the disc in, a look of lip-chewing ecstasy on her face as 'Jailhouse Rock' came on. "Oh, yeah. Mr. Presley, take me home."

Jo tipped back her head to laugh again…

From then on, across the miles the one constant became music.

Pepper confessed her love of underground indie rock and the stuff that side-wound around alternative. Jo said always been a power ballad girl from the moment her daddy bought the old jukebox for the Roadhouse.

After the Man from Memphis, their meeting of the minds came in the form of The Beatles Greatest Hits, a bootleg copy of which Jo found under the Bronco's driver's seat.

They crooned 'Yesterday', wailed out 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand' and jived the miles away to 'Twist and Shout', throwing the lines back and forward between them.

From there the list seemed endless. The Beatles bled into classic Beach Boys, Eartha Kitt, the Andrew Sisters and one dreamy song by Nat King Cole that had them both sighing like Sandra Dee in _Grease_.

Three days later they stopped in another town and hit up a used music store. They discovered more modern incarnations; Melody Gardot became an instant favorite (Jo had a similar singing voice and could match Gardot perfectly when she sang along.) Pepper found a single by a band called The Stray Cats – 'The Stray Cat Strut' – which had the pair of them in stitches of giggles whenever they listened to it.

Two towns and a truck stop after that there was another store. Their haul was all modern female artists, both big name and the suitably obscure. They sang the day away – couldn't help themselves – with Amy Winehouse and Florence + the Machine, and oh boy, Ladyhawke set them on _fire_.

They whooped and laughed and danced in place, one hand each out of the Bronco's windows and curving in the slipstream of cool, rushing air.

"It's too late, it's too late  
It's too late to call back yesterday  
It's too late, it's too late  
I'm just another runaway."

If Jo was Melody Gardot, Pepper was Pip Brown, and together they learned to sing harmonies in every song they loved.

"I'm just another runaway,  
Another runaway,  
Another runaway…"

* * *

She called her mother one morning from a disposable cell phone that Jo bought her.

"It's not fair that my mom knows I'm okay and yours doesn't," was all she said, voice soft in the hush of the new day. She parked the Bronco on the side of the road and walked a short way into the field beside it to give Pepper some privacy.

Pepper watched her go, her hands shaking. She dialed the number from memory and cried when the answering machine picked up.

"Hi, you've reached the Montgomery's," said her mother's voice on the recording, and it nearly broke her. When Gordon had tortured her, she'd thought she'd never hear her mother's voice again before she died. "We can't come to the phone right now, so just leave us a message after the – BEEP."

Tears fell steadily down her face, and her voice was thick when she spoke.

"Mom? It's me, its Pepper. I – I'm okay." She sniffed hard. "I am. Really. I wasn't before, when I got taken… But I'm okay now. I'm staying away for a while, because I don't know if I'm being followed…tracked… I don't know if he'll follow me home and I don't want anyone else to get hurt, for us to get found out…

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry I went out there again. It was so stupid…" She crushed her eyes closed. "I love you," she whispered. "I love you, Mom, Ana, Cy. I love you so much. I'll try and get home when I can, when this gets sorted out."

She hung up and threw down the phone, great, wracking sobs pulling her to pieces from the inside. She shivered and shook, and when Jo was drawn back by her cries she folded into the other girl's arms and hung on for dear life.

Jo whispered to her and held her and told her it was going to be okay.

And somehow, it seemed like it might be.

* * *

Pepper was almost getting used to the whole motel thing.

She was also getting used to Jo, which was nice. Meeting new people was something that didn't happen often if you lived in Eclipse River. People rarely moved away, and even more rarely moved in. The last new faces to have arrived in Eclipse River had been the Winchester brothers, although Pepper's family was considered new blood because her father had been an out-of-towner…

Pepper scowled, feeling her eyes well up in reaction and scrubbed at her face. She hated that she still got weepy over losing Dad. She sighed and cuddled the lumpy pillow, cataloguing her surroundings to distract herself.

On the other bed in the little room, Jo was still sleeping, her hair a pale swath of gold and one hand tucked under her pillow. Pepper studied her friend thoughtfully, and wondered how she was going to manage the situation when…well, when it all went sideways, really.

Because even now, she could feel it; the full moon was maybe four days out, and the antsy, feverish energy it brought to her blood was already making her a little stir-crazy. She knew Jo had noticed and put it down to the euphoria of freedom – heck, Jo was pretty euphoric herself – but soon it was going to go beyond that. At some point, she was expecting the other girl to sit her down and ask if she was high or whether the nuttiness went hand-in-hand with the red hair and kooky fashion sense.

As it turned out, things got out of hand much sooner than Pepper had foreseen.

The morning went much as the morning of the previous week had; with breakfast in the nearest (and cleanest) diner. This one happened to be at a truck stop, and as such there were several big rigs in the parking lot; huge gleaming beasts with eagles and tigers air-brushed onto their doors and scantily-clad figurines on their hoods. One bore the memorable legend 'truckers do it in the front seat' on the driver's side door.

"No accounting for taste," Jo commented as they walked past.

They were almost to the diner's door when there was a crash from inside the nearest truck.

Both girls froze, staring – then nearly leaped out of their collective skins when a blunt-muzzled mongrel appeared at the passenger side window of the truck's cab. It put its snout up against the glass with a thud and stared back at them with wild eyes before opening its jaws and barking up a frenzy.

"Jeez," Jo said, stepping back and taking a near nerveless Pepper with her, "what the fuck is that thing _on_?"

Pepper wordlessly shook her head, unable to take her eyes off the animal. She'd never seen a dog this close before. The animal's gaze was almost hypnotic, in a frenzied kind of way. People in Eclipse River didn't have animals – especially dogs – for this exact reason; wolves of any kind were the natural enemy of domestic pets, and even the stupidest of those pets knew it.

Jo took Pepper's arm and turned them both back to the diner. "C'mon, Red. We'll leave Little Lord Lunatic to his rant. Pancakes await," she added cheerfully.

Pepper smiled, and made an effort to hide her twitching fingers.

Things only got worse from there.

They were halfway through breakfast when Pepper excused herself and headed for the bathroom. Her skin felt like it was going to peel off if she didn't do something. A quick flick back and forward – girl wolf girl – and she would be relatively sane for the rest of the day and most of that night.

She'd had strong reactions to the approaching moon before, but this was the strongest. She suspected it had something to do with the recent trauma, and the comfort her other shape brought. It made her wonder if her recovery would have gone differently – been easier – if she'd been at home.

She shook her head, discounting the thought. She was here, with Jo, _now_, and had to deal with it. It was too dangerous to go home at the moment, and besides, wasn't this what she'd wanted all along? A chance to get out and see the rest of the country she called home –?

_Ow._

She'd been so caught up in her inner musings she'd stopped paying attention to her surroundings. Surroundings which included other people, one of which she had just collided with.

The guy was clearly a trucker (the shipping company logo on his vest giving him away) and one who hadn't stopped at any point to take advantage of a set of facilities in a while. He was _ripe_, so much so that Pepper couldn't even blame it on her rising Lycan senses.

"Sorry," she murmured, and went to slip past him.

"Hey there, wait a second," he said, one large hand gripping her shoulder.

Pepper froze. Every sense went on animal-quick alert and her hind-brain came to life like a flash of lightning in the back of her mind.

"I don't take kindly to being knocked about," the trucker was saying, and Pepper could smell his breath; bacon, strong coffee and a sour edge of decay. She was willing to bet he had a tooth rotting in the back of his maw somewhere. The scent made her stomach roil.

He smiled and it got worse. "I don't mind as much when the one doin' the knocking's pretty though." His hand tightened on her shoulder. "Why don't you come sit with me? Just to talk…"

The wolf swarmed under her skin.

"Let go of me," she said softly.

His mouth twisted. "What?"

"Please. Let go. Of me."

_Threat_, the wolf said from the deep well of her hind-brain, and her fontal lobe agreed.

As though to prove it he leaned in and in a rough whisper that had the hackles rising along her spine said, "_No_."

"Pepper?"

Oh, thank God.

Jo.

"Who's your friend?" the trucker asked.

Pepper took a step back, slipping out from under his hand. "I just want to get to the bathroom," she said.

Jo was eyeing the trucker with the sort of look Pepper had seen her give particularly unpleasant specimens of road kill. Without a word to him, she took Pepper's hand and began leading her to aforementioned bathroom.

"Now, wait just a minute," the trucker growled, reaching out. "We were going to have a _talk_ –"

Both girls moved so fast the trucker didn't know what hit him.

Pepper darted away from his grasping hand while Jo grabbed it and folded it neatly behind his beefy back. The trucker gave a howl of surprise and pain that drew the attention of the rest of the diners. They looked on in surprise as teeny-tiny blonde Jo bent the man very nearly in half with an absurdly cheerful look on her face.

"A talk, huh? Is that a fact? Is that why you were getting all breathy and fucking _grabby_?" Jo said, happy as can be. "Because it looked to me like you were about to take advantage of my poor friend there."

She looked up at Pepper for confirmation. Pepper nodded, feeling a little woozy. The wolf was still calling out just under her skin – she could almost feel her bones bending, her nails hardening, fur growing – and she knew she was pale.

"He wouldn't let go of me," she said, hearing her voice wobble. Her eyes felt hot…

The trucker made a choking sound, his beady eyes wide and fixed on Pepper's face.

Jo, oblivious, let out a disgusted snarl and kicked the back of the guy's knees, forcing him to kneel. She wrenched his arm once, making him yelp, then let go and herded Pepper towards the diner's door, pausing only to throw a handful of bills onto their table as they passed.

They were in the parking lot and climbing into the Bronco when the rest of the diner's occupants got over their shock and started talking again at such volume that both girls could hear it. The dog, still trapped in the big rig's cab, started its manic barking again.

"What a fucking jerk!" Jo spat from behind the wheel. "If we'd been at the Roadhouse, I woulda broken his fingers and fed them to him. Are you okay?" she added, turning to Pepper, abruptly anxious. "I could still go back and break his fingers. If it'd make you feel better?"

Pepper mustered a smile and shook her head. "Let's just find somewhere to pee."

"You're really okay?"

"Sure."

_Not._

* * *

Sam leaned against the Impala's side, eyes focused on the gibbous moon overhead, bleached to a pale shell in the afternoon sky.

It was a stark reminder that they were running out of time.

Even now, Eclipse River was gearing up to the full moon. When he and Dean had shipped out the place had been a hive of excitement, despite the anxiety over the missing pup.

Wherever she was, Sam sincerely hoped Pepper was okay…

There was the sound of a door swinging shut and Dean appeared on the steps of the sheriff's office shrugging on his coat.

Sam straightened. "What'd you get?"

"A lead," his brother answered. "Well, kinda."

Sam's eyebrows went up. "Kinda?"

Dean rubbed the back of his neck. "Yeah… The guy was willing to talk, or you know, babble incoherently. All me or anyone else could get out of him was that he got 'jumped by a pair of demon women, one with crazy yellow eyes'."

"Not…"

"Not the thing that got Mom," Dean said quietly, "no. He said her eyes flashed yellow like an animal's. Add 'thin, red hair, blue and silver earrings' and this is definitely our girl."

"So this was this morning?"

"Uh-huh."

"Dean, this is good," Sam exclaimed, about to climb into the car. "It means we're only half a day behind."

"That's not all of it."

Sam paused. "What?"

"He said a _pair of demon women_, Sam. There's someone with her. We know it's not the same person who snatched her thanks to the cryptic phone call Lettie got… But wherever she is, Pepper's not alone."

Sam frowned. "You get a description?"

"Yeah. Small, blonde, pretty, somehow made a man twice her size into a pretzel."

Sam kept right on frowning. "What, supernaturally? With enhanced strength?"

"Actually, from the witness reports it looked more like a self-defense maneuver."

"So…what are we dealing with?"

"I have two theories."

"Okay."

Dean smiled. "Wanna hear the crazy one or the crazier one first?"

Sam wordlessly raised his eyebrows.

"Okay," said Dean. "Its clearly either one; Buffy the Vampire Slayer –"

"Oh, for the love of…"

"– or two; a little blonde ninja."

There was pause as the two men regarded each other over the roof of the Impala.

Finally Sam said, "That's what you've got? Buffy or 'a little blonde ninja'?"

Dean drummed his fingers on the car's driver's side. "Yup."

Sam sighed. "Okay. I hate to say it…but I think we need to call Dad."

**

* * *

AN:** Okay, so I realize this takes place in 2006. And that Florence and the Machine have only really populated the airwaves this year. Witness me not caring. 'Another Runaway' is from LadyHawke aka Pip Brown. Reviews are made of love... :D


	4. The beast howls in my veins

**AN:** The perfect song for this story, in fact for this chapter, is probably Florence and the Machine's "Howl", as quoted below. I would suggest queing it up about now.

* * *

**Chapter Four**

_The saints can't help me now,  
The ropes have been unbound,  
I hunt for you with bloodied feet across the hallow'd ground…_  
– Florence and the Machine, 'Howl' –

It was like an itch she couldn't scratch, a burr on her back, a burning, clawing thing that writhed under her skin.

The full moon was coming, and coming fast…

Pepper shivered.

* * *

John was not having a fantastic day.

For one, he was stuck in a town full of people who weren't really people…fuck it. He was in a town full of people who periodically turned into wolves and had frighteningly few boundaries when it came to nudity.

And _two_, he was the only guy in town who didn't periodically turn into a wolf and have frighteningly few boundaries when it came to nudity. Why? Because his sons – both human and Lycan – had been recruited to go looking for a missing 'pup'…while John was apparently under house arrest until the more 'trustworthy' parts of Clan Winchester got back.

If pushed (okay, _threatened with being pushed off a cliff_) John would admit that this was one of the nicer places to be incarcerated. He mostly had Dean's place to himself, except when Jaina dropped by to offer to cook and make sure he hadn't spontaneously turned into a rampaging lunatic hell-bent on their annihilation. Today when Jaina came, however, she wasn't alone.

"John, there's someone who wants to speak to you…"

He reluctantly followed Jaina out onto the porch. And stopped.

The woman leaning up against the patrol car wore a deputy's star and had eyes that could cut holes in a person. There was determination in the set of her shoulders and the solemn angles of her face. Brass-blonde hair was pulled back from her face into a bun at the nape of her neck, making her jaw and cheekbones sharper and somehow reminding him of a wasp's triangular face.

"This is Deputy Bea Mason," Jaina told him.

"Mr. Winchester," Mason said, watching him steadily and not offering to shake his hand, "I've been told you're something of a tracker."

Well, that was unexpected. He felt his eyebrows go up a fraction.

"I suppose," he agreed cautiously. "Can I ask what this is all about?"

The two women exchanged looks. Jaina looked anxious, Mason like…well, like a wolf, actually. Even without the alien yellow gaze that signaled her other half peering out at the world, Mason had that kind of supremely still, watchful look, as though finding his tells, his tics and small movements. As though using them to read him.

John felt a spill of cold down his spine, the hair there rising in a wary line.

"No doubt you've heard about Pepper," Mason murmured.

"The girl who's missing?"

The Deputy nodded. "As I said, I was told you were a tracker. Ours aren't having much luck." This time, those eyes really did cut holes in him, flickering luminous gold for the barest instant. "We figured since you're here you might as well make yourself useful."

In a peripheral way, he understood that he was being tested. It didn't stop him from getting angry, from grinding his teeth and clenching his fists and narrowing his eyes at her.

She watched him steadily, and John took a breath.

_Suck it up, Winchester. You're doing this for Dean. Remember that._

"What do you need?"

* * *

"Pepper?" Jo said softly.

Pepper looked up, blinking in the light as she lifted her head. She was slumped sideways in the front passenger seat, her bare feet dangling out the open door. The driver's side door was open too; Jo's attempt to get some cool air through the truck while they were stopped. Around them, the minimart's small parking lot was mostly empty.

Jo put a paper cup of soda in her hands and the cold was a shock Pepper felt all the way to the small bones of her hands. She sipped and watched Jo rip open a bag of cheap face cloths, wetting one with bottled water. She carefully wrung it out a little, then brushed Pepper's hair back from her face – hands hot and soft save for the little calluses left by the handle of her daddy's iron knife – and laid the cloth over the younger girl's forehead. Pepper leaned into the contact, blessing the momentary relief. Goosebumps spilled across her skin.

Jo let out a rough sigh through her nose, dark eyes full of solemn worry.

"This isn't good, Red," she said softly. "I know it's risky, but if you're sick we need to go to a hospital, or a clinic or something."

"'m not sick," Pepper rasped.

"With a fever like this? Jesus, Pep, yes, you are."

"Don't call me 'Pep'."

"Yeah, yeah… Look, let's find a motel, okay? We'll take it easy today."

Pepper nodded in helpless agreement.

_Soon. It was going to have to be soon._

* * *

Mason spent the ride out to the bus stop briefing him.

"This wasn't the first time she'd come out here," she told him. "Pepper managed to get as far as the shelter four times. I picked her up and brought her back each time."

"And nothing was done about it?"

She shot him a sidelong look. "You can't exactly lock up a seventeen-year-old girl until she graduates and grows a lick of sense. We'd tried talking to her, but she's sheltered – they all are, really – and I don't think she believed us. It took meeting your boys to get her to wise up and settle down."

John frowned. "Then why did she come out here again?"

Mason sighed. "We're not sure. That one phone call of hers didn't shed any light…so at this point, we're just trying to focus on finding her. Dean and Sam's most recent report to Lucas and the Sherriff's office suggests she's free, but not traveling alone."

"Then why ask me for help tracking whoever took her? If she's taken off chances are her captor won't know shit about where she is."

Mason had that frighteningly still predator's look back on her face. "That's not why we want to find him," she said quietly.

John stared at her, wheels clicking over in his head. "Shit," he snarled. "_Shit_."

Mason said nothing, confirmed nothing, but John knew it was true; they would use him to find whoever took the girl and then they would kill him. Whether they did it quick or took some kind of drawn out revenge…he didn't know. He didn't know how these things- these people thought, or what kind of justice they would mete out.

But he knew what he would do if it was his kid that had been taken. And he knew, suddenly, like bolt of lightning through his brain, that he would be in no position to throw stones.

_It's still a human life… Its still murder…_

"We're here," Mason said, pulling the patrol car over and getting out.

John followed her more slowly, taking in his surroundings. The road was narrow, two-lane blacktop, scruffy with disuse. The woods hemmed it in on either side, the trees reaching up tall, but not quite meeting overhead, and unlike his last encounter with these woodlands, the sunlight seemed to find its way between them more easily.

There was nothing overtly sinister here, save for the knowledge of what had happened a little under a fortnight ago.

Mason stood with several others around the bus shelter where the girl had been taken, and John could see others moving amongst the trees. Two were in wolf shape, padding silently through the undergrowth with their noses to the ground. As John drew up beside Mason, one of the wolves broke away and came down the slope to them. He noted the small stature, the almost dust-coloured coat as it – _oh, jeez_ – as _she_, evidently, changed almost mid-stride, going from four legs to two with barely a pause.

John cleared his throat uneasily and looked away. Mason shot him a sidelong look of amusement.

"Ella," she greeted the other woman. "Anything?"

"No. At least, nothing new." John heard the pitch of her voice change minutely; she was smiling. "You can look now."

John did, and found her still smiling – at him – as she did up the last buttons on her dress. She shook her head faintly, chuckling. "So polite," she murmured. "Like your sons."

His eyes locked on her. "You know my boys?"

She nodded. "I introduced them to Pepper."

Before he could ask – ask, interrogate, whatever – Mason cut in with, "John Winchester, Ella Reed. Ella's the guidance counselor at the high school."

Ella held out her hand without hesitation, and John found himself shaking it before his brain could catch up and make token protests that not two minutes ago this woman was wearing the kind of fur coat that doesn't come off and had a set of jaws capable of crushing bone.

But her palm was warm and smooth, and about as human as you could hope for.

And she was still smiling, though a little sadly now.

"Those with the best noses are out here today, getting what we can," Mason explained. "Seeing if we missed something."

"Have you?" John asked.

It was Ella who answered. "Feels like it." She sighed, combing her hair back from her forehead. "We can find Pepper's trail, the path she took back and forward in the trees. We can find where she was girl-shaped and when she changed and ran, and then a second trail where she was afraid…"

She broke off, swallowing. "We've found the scent of her attacker, and the morphine he used to drug her. We also found traces of silver. Very tiny, very fine."

"Colloidal," John murmured. "The only people I can think of who would use colloidal silver in with a drug…"

"Is a hunter," Mason finished. When John met her eyes, they were burnished gold. "Now you know why we can't track him, and why we're hoping _you_ can."

* * *

They were back-tracking when Dean's phone threw a familiar guitar hook through the car. Sam grabbed it, taking a quick glance at the name on the screen before flicking it open.

"Deputy Bea –"

"Guess again, son."

"Dad?"

He and Dean exchanged a look. They hadn't expected to hear from John, at least not until after they called him.

"What're you doing on Deputy Bea's phone?" Sam asked, honestly puzzled, then added, "We were just about to call you."

Amazingly, John actually answered the questions this time without being annoyingly cryptic. "I'm out at the…crime-scene, I guess, with the Deputy and a few others."

Sam's spine went ramrod-straight. "You're _what_?"

"What'd he say?" Dean demanded from the driver's seat, eyes flicking between the road and his brother.

"He's at the bus shelter," Sam told him.

Dean was equally incredulous. "Where Pepper was taken?"

"Yeah."

"Why –?"

"If I could get a goddamned word in edgeways?" John cut in, sounding rather crotchety. "Turns out we're all looking for another hunter."

There was an awkward pause. For once, John was the one playing catch up while Sam and Dean had been sent out into the field with all the information. It was…a weird feeling.

"Yeah. Hang on. I'll, uh, put you on speaker phone," Sam said. "Bea and Ella told us about the silver before we headed out. We just can't figure out who it might be. It's why we were going to call you."

"But you reported to Lucas and the Sherriff's Office first."

"Yes," Sam responded, keeping his voice level. "This is their investigation, Dad, not our hunt."

He could hear John breathe out roughly through his nose…

And then, miracle of miracles, put a lid on it. Sam and Dean gave each other looks of surprise.

"…yeah. Anyway. I called to tell you, there isn't enough here for me to identify who the hunter might me, but I know some people who might. Got an old friend who runs a bar in Nebraska where hunters pass through. Chances are the guy who snatched Pepper headed there at some point."

"How can you be sure?" Sam demanded.

"He gave her colloidal silver. And I'll bet you dollars to donuts he used it on her in some other way too. When she didn't react it would've unnerved him, gotten his back up. He'll have gone looking for information, contacts. Someone he can discuss the problem with and maybe see if anyone else has seen something like it before."

"Makes sense… got directions?"

John did, and Sam carefully jotted them one the back of the print-outs in his lap. "And we talk to…Ellen Harvelle, right?"

"Yeah, just…don't mention my name unless you have to."

"Why not?"

"She might shoot you. Dean?"

"Uh, yeah, Dad?"

"Mason mentioned you'd got a lead on whoever's travelling with Pepper…?"

Sam grinned. "Dean's got a couple of theories, Dad. Wanna hear 'em?"

"That's not funny, Sam!" Dean shouted. "Don't listen to him, Dad, he's being a dick!"

"What theories?" John asked.

"Well," Sam started. "Either Buffy the Vampire Slayer –"

"You are so getting it, Sam. When you least expect it…"

"– or a little blonde ninja."

When John didn't immediately laugh or scold, Sam's grin faded. "Dad? You still there?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm here, Sammy… 'Little blonde ninja,' you say?"

"Uh…yeah…" Dean had a look on his face like he couldn't believe he was about to say, "do you…Dad, do you _know_ a little blonde ninja?"

John laughed, _actually laughed_, and said, "No…no, sadly not. Dean, what made you think of that? What was the actual description?"

"Small, blonde, strong. Knew some wicked self-defense moves. I mean this guy was big, meaty, and pretty much shitting himself."

"Did anyone see what kind of car she was driving?"

Sam hastily flipped through the somewhat illegal print-outs of the police records. "A waitress on her smoke break saw them get into a late model pale blue utility vehicle. A Ford, maybe a Bronco, but she didn't think to remember the plates."

"Ah, crap," John grouched. "Just…crap."

"Dad?"

"I know who it is," their father said tiredly. "You're gonna want to get to Nebraska pretty fucking quickly."

"But, what about Pepper?"

"Boys, trust me on this. Jo Harvelle's a real pistol, but she knows better than to leave her mama in the dark while she hares off across the country. The quicker you get to that bar, the better chance you have of tracking those girls."

There was a thoughtful pause before John added, "And the less chance you have of being shot."

* * *

Jo leaned against the wall, feeling rough, damp stucco through the fabric of her jacket, and waited for the ice machine to kick into gear. Around her, the motel's forecourt was quiet and still, the only vehicles present locked up tight for the night. Jo spotted a rusted out Camry, a Holden with out of state plates and a small removals truck near her own Bronco. Someone was making a long trip…

The ice machine grunted, making noises of mechanical constipation before finally wheezing hard and spitting a few handfuls of ice cubes into the bucket. Jo grabbed the handle and began to make her way back to the room.

She and Pepper had been here all day, both struggling to get the redhead's fever under control. Jo shook her head, silently marveling. It wasn't like any kind of fever she'd ever seen. The moment the sun went down, Pepper's apparent lethargy morphed into a bizarre kind of restlessness, the girl pacing as she burned, sweat seeping across her skin in small torrents.

Jo would never admit it, but she was beginning to get a little frightened. Pepper didn't have much experience with the supernatural besides being kidnapped by a hunter, and so wouldn't have known if Gordon had put some kind of time-bomb curse on her. Other hunters would flinch as messing with the kind of dark arts they hunted people down for, but Gordon was a Grade-A hypocrite and a vindictive bastard of the first order. Could this fever be Gordon's insurance policy, designed to…? To what? Drive Pepper mad, maybe, or rip her apart from the inside?

Jo shivered and quickened her step. Overhead, the moon was rising, a fingernail away from full. The next day she fully intended to bust out the weapons duffle – which she still hadn't told Pepper about – from under the Bronco's drivers seat and load up the silver shot. After all, you never knew what was lurking about, and they were in parts very-fucking-unknown right now.

Later, Jo would kick herself for not having a silver-loaded handgun on her _now_.

As it was her first warning that something was up was the sound of door hinge repeatedly squeaking. As she came around the corner of the veranda and the rooms came into sight, she spotted one open door…open, because it had been forced open. The thing was sitting at a funny angle and squeaking every time the wind hit it. Jo jumped when the wind blew hard enough to send it into the wall with a shotgun-sharp crack.

Senses on Defcon-1 she approached the door, drawing her daddy's knife as she did so and taking a firmer grip on the ice bucket, prepared to use it as a weapon if she had to.

The door swung, swung again, creaking and clapping…

…and that was when Jo heard the claws.

* * *

She wasn't sure what woke her.

Unlike humans, Lycans had a sense of smell in their sleep, so it was completely conceivable that Pepper had smelled the threat before she heard it. After all, it was only the faintest scraping – just the suggestion of nails against the wooded boards of the veranda outside…the smell, however, was something else. Pungent, metallic, like spilt blood or raw flesh, hot and sour and somehow…wrong.

Very wrong.

Then Jo screamed.

Pepper was out the door before she even realized she was moving.

* * *

This could not be happening.

Seriously. Could not. Be happening.

Jo backed up, holding the (fucking useless) iron knife out in front of her.

The werewolf, entirely unconcerned with the blade, stalked steadily closer.

Underneath the rampaging, boiling terror, she found the sight of some average dude – in a church talent show t-shirt and khaki shorts no less – slinking across the veranda with claws and a snarl kind of heartbreaking. Her dad had always hated werewolf hunts, because the predators were just prey, just people, underneath the savagery and unaware of the horror that rode them during those three crucial days of the full moon.

And this, this made no sense _at all_. It wasn't even the full moon yet, they were one day out and…really not the time to be wondering _why_ the thing was here.

"Steady," Jo breathed, in some vain hope that it would calm down, back off a little, like a dog might…only this thing was rabid. "Steady…"

She backed up, backed up…and then something gave under her weight, a rotten plank in the veranda or whatever, it didn't matter because she was down, falling, _exposed_…

She heard a snarl, heard herself scream as the thing leapt…only to go flying sideways when a grey and russet blur shot out of nowhere and tackled the werewolf mid-leap.

Jo looked on, caught between horror, relief and total confusion as the two shapes roared and tore at each other. They barreled into the veranda's railing and there was a snap like a gunshot as the wooden banister broke. The flurry of movement never even paused. There was a sudden, violent flash grey fur and the werewolf let out a low, pained yelp. The two opponents parted for a second, but it was long enough for Jo to see that the grey and russet blur was now not a blur at all, but a wolf.

A real, actual, full-on _wolf_.

_What the FUCK, man?_

And half a second later, of course, the wolf was throwing itself back into combat with the werewolf. Blood and fur flew, terrible animal cries filled the night air, and by some minor miracle no one came to investigate.

Jo backed the fuck away from the brawling creatures, breathing hard as tears poured down her face, and darted over to the Bronco parked nearby in the motel forecourt. She fumbled and almost dropped the keys twice, listening to the spine-snapping sounds of the fight, actually able to smell the spilt blood on the air now, but finally managed to get the driver's side door unlocked. She dove in and grabbed the weapons duffle from under the driver's seat, the one Pepper once asked an awkward question about – _"Jo, what's in that thing that keeps clanking?"_ – and pulled out one of the things that clanked.

"I have never been so glad to see you in my life," Jo told the six-shot Smith & Wesson, voice trembling. It had been her dad's, the one that was always, _always_ loaded with silver shot and had the name of his old war buddy inscribed on its side. "Charlie," she breathed, "don't fail me now."

She climbed out of the truck and back to the fray. There were spatters of blood on the veranda and upon the walls of the building itself, yet still, they fought; savage, awful, inhuman…

Jo realized she was going to have to part them in order to get a clear shot.

_Oh, fuck my life._

"Hey," she barked, sounding acres braver than she felt.

The werewolf shoved the wolf into the side of the building, sending it skidding across the blood-slicked planks to fetch up against one of the room doors. Then it turned to Jo – and she realized she'd made a mistake.

Werewolves could jump faster than most humans can draw.

The wind went out of her as she hit the forecourt, gravel biting savagely into her back. Teeth closed on the air two inches from her face, hot breath blasted her skin, the werewolf's crazed eyes staring straight at her, looking right through her…and going still when her finger closed on the six-shooter's trigger and sent a single silver bullet into the chambers of its heart.

She let out a trapped-animal noise and pushed the guy off her, rolling him onto his back. Blood coursed steadily from the neat hole in his chest, in his stupid church tee-shirt. Jo began sobbing in earnest as his teeth withdrew and the pale, mad color leaked from his eyes, leaving them blue and painfully human.

"Where," he gasped, "where am I? Oh, god…" One hand weakly touched the blood spilling from the absurdly tiny wound. "What…what ha-happened…I…" His head rolled to the side, towards the motel veranda, and became strangely serene.

Jo followed his gaze. The wolf was coming towards them, bloodied, beaten and dejected. Jo could hardly muster enough feeling to get scared of the thing. It had saved her life, after all.

Then her world took a swift turn to the right that left her reeling and made certain parts of her brain short-circuit.

Mid-stride, the wolf changed. There was no longer a wolf there at all. There was…there was…

There was Pepper.

Pepper; naked as the day she was born, wearing only her bracelet and her long red hair. There was blood smeared on her skin, and wounds seeming to close over before Jo's eyes. The other girl was crying too, her nose and eyes red, tears making tracks in the dust and blood on her face.

"I'm dreaming," the dying man said.

Both girls look down at him, watched as his last breath left him and the light went out of his half-closed eyes.

Jo staggered to her feet, pistol in one hand while the other was clasped over her mouth. She stepped back from the body, shaking.

"Jo."

She looked up at Pepper, who was staring at her with wide amber eyes.

"Jo, I'm sorry, I…"

Jo shook her head, forced herself to drop the hand from her face, even though it felt like it was the only think keeping her from being sick.

"No, Pepper," she said, harsher than she'd meant, and felt doubly awful when the younger girl flinched. "We – we have to go. We have to go right the fuck now."

* * *

**AN:** And...scene. So, questions? Comments? Explosions?


	5. Blame it on a rush of blood to the head

**AN:** Yes, hello, I'm back. How's everybody doing? Have a good Christmas? I did. So. Much. Food.

**

* * *

Chapter Five**

_Bang bang  
I shot you down, bang bang  
You hit the ground, bang bang  
That awful sound, bang bang  
I used to shoot you down_  
– Nancy Sinatra, 'Bang Bang' –

The quiet in the motel forecourt was unnatural, breathless somehow. Or maybe it was that Jo could only hear her own heartbeat booming in her ears, drowning out everything else.

Pepper stood, still naked and very definitely a natural redhead, giving Jo a silent beseeching look, tears trailing in shining lines down her freckled cheeks.

"Jo," she tried again. "Jo, please, please just listen –"

Jo shook herself into action. She grabbed Pepper's arm and dragged her back to the room. It felt like she was walking on stilts; every movement too much, too unsteady and sudden as she pulled Pepper into the room.

"Get your stuff," she said, her voice sounding miles away. Snatching up the room key, she shoved it into her pocket and headed for the front office. Behind her, she heard Pepper begin crying in earnest. Jo swallowed the lump in her throat and kept walking.

The walk took her past the forecourt…past the body. She stopped, limbs still feeling jerky and awkward. Looking back and forward between the body and the office she hovered, wringing the hand that wasn't clutching the six-shooter.

_Damn it…_

Jo darted over to the dead man, hand almost flinching back before she put the gun in her waist band and dragged him over to the Camry, sweat breaking out on her face and chest as she heaved. It was lucky he was on the small side…she immediately felt sick with guilt for the thought, then pushed it down to the back of her mind and rolled the body under the ill-kept car.

She wiped her sweating palms on her jeans as she turned her back, shoulders twitching, and ran for the front office, intending to ditch the room key…

Then she swung the office door open, and it all went sideways.

Jo had thought it a mercy that no one had come to investigate the racket created by the werewolf and the wolf – by the werewolf and _Pepper_ – but she wasn't thinking it now.

She gagged and coughed at the smell, staring at the scene through watering eyes and clasping a hand over her mouth.

The manager, who had been so understanding of Pepper's illness, was collapsed against the front desk, eyes mercifully closed, and would have looked for all the world as though he'd fallen asleep on the job…were it not for the bloody ruin of his neck and torso, the remainder of his insides piled in his lap.

The noisy couple that had been the motel's only other guests, arriving drunk and horny and already half out of their clothes, were now merged in a swiftly congealing pool of blood and limbs, ribs pulled a part and both their hearts torn out.

Through the open staff room door, the housekeeper could be seen face down with her left hand frozen in the act of scrabbling at the linoleum floor while the right clutched her half-crushed throat. The werewolf had evidently pinned her there and gone through her back to get to her heart, exposing the glistening knobs of her spine and a shattered nest of bone and muscle where it had broken her ribs and left shoulder blade.

No one had come, because there was no one left alive to.

Jo's mind raced, trying to think how this could have happened without she and Pepper hearing.

Unless…

Both the housekeeper and the manager had damaged throats which might have kept them from screaming for help. The couple probably had the same before they were ripped into some many pieces.

Jo swallowed back her nausea, frantically wiped her prints from the room key and dropped it into the trash can beside the umbrella stand and bolted back to the room. She felt something on her face and found herself scrubbing away tears.

Back in the room Pepper was dressed again, her own face tearstained and miserable. Jo felt sick again. She grabbed her stuff and began packed in record time.

"We have to go," she said again, throwing her bag over her shoulder.

"Jo," Pepper said, voice wobbling with emotion as she stood clutching the strap of her own bag. "Please, just stop, just _listen_ to me…"

Jo shook her head, grabbed Pepper's wrist, feeling the now-familiar bumps and ridges of her lapis and silver bracelet under her palm, and hauled the other girl out of the room. Pepper made a high-pitched noise in the back of her throat and pulled back on her wrist.

Jo lost her temper. "Pepper," she snapped. "We have to go, _now_!"

The redhead flinched and made another small pained noise, but allowed herself to be manhandled into the Bronco.

As Jo threw the car into drive and skidded out of the lot both were weeping.

Overhead, the moon carried on, cold and gibbous, its light catching on the blood spattered nails of the man's hand where it protruded from under the rusted out Camry.

* * *

Ten miles down the road they had to pull over.

Pepper bolted from the Bronco's front passenger seat and was violently ill into the grassy ditch that ran either side of the asphalt. She coughed, wiped her mouth and trudged back to the car. Jo was waiting for her, leaning against the front passenger door. The six-shooter was still in her waistband.

"You okay?" she muttered, looking uncomfortable.

"Been better," Pepper croaked. "I'll be fine."

Jo shifted her shoulders, looking up at her. There was nothing out of the ordinary about her face, her expression, but Pepper felt her stomach drop anyway.

"Pepper," she said, "what are you?"

Pepper felt like her world was caving in. "I'm…I'm your friend, Jo."

"I'm not…" Jo's mouth thinned, lips compressing into a white line. "What I mean is –"

"What you mean is, _am I human_?"

Her eyes burned, and Pepper knew she was on the verge of tears. She felt like such a fool. It had been a fantasy, thinking that maybe someone outside the Pack would understand, but…but for a while it had been nice. And there was no going back now. Only forwards…

"I'm a Lycanthrope."

Jo stared at her. "Pepper, that's just another word for 'werewolf', and I know you're not one of those. Silver has no effect on you and –"

But Pepper shook her head, hair flying in short, anxious arcs around her shoulders. "No, no, it's not, _it's not_! Lycanthropes are different, _we're_ different. People just confused the two over time, because some of the rules that bind us are similar. We change, yes, but…when I'm the wolf, I'm still me; I'm still Pepper, not just an angry hindbrain."

She shrugged, feeling small and self-conscious, but determined.

"The wolf and I are one and the same; two legs or four doesn't change who I am."

Jo was watching her with uncertain eyes. "You just described a skin-walker, Pepper, and you change like one. Only…only you can't be one of those either because the silver –"

"Has no effect." Pepper shook her head again, slowly this time. "You don't get it, Jo; _I'm not a monster_. I don't have some mystical Achilles Heel. I'm just a person with two shapes."

Jo's eyes never left her, gaze steadier than it had been, as though the ground had stopped shifting under her feet.

"I think," she began, then broke off, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. "I think…if you were a monster you would have killed me before that werewolf had the chance to. I think if you weren't my friend you wouldn't have saved me from it. Pepper – oomph!"

Pepper – who really was at the end of her rope by this point – had lurched forward and simply wrapped herself around Jo, burying her face in the other girl's shoulder and started to cry again. Jo's arms tentatively closed around her, tightening when Pepper began shaking.

"Hey," Jo said, "hey, c'mon, Pep, don't cry…"

Pepper gulped air and hiccupped into Jo's hair, "Don't call me 'Pep'."

Jo started to laugh.

* * *

They drove through the night, running on roadside store coffee and adrenaline. They avoided main highways so Pepper could take turns driving and pulled over as late as three-forty AM to finally huddle down to sleep.

Pepper was just about to get comfortable when – "OW!" – something sharp jabbed her in the wrist.

"Pepper?" Jo's head appeared over the front seat, blonde hair a nest of tangles.

"I – something – my bracelet…"

Jo reached up and turned on the dome light and Pepper sat up, pulling her sleeping bag up around her shoulders. Jo took Pepper's wrist in her hands and delicately searched the bracelet's leather and silver links. Just beside the clasp, something unfamiliar caught the light.

"Shit," she breathed.

"What is it?" Pepper asked, heart in her mouth.

Jo, using the fingernails of her thumb and forefinger, carefully withdrew what looked like a yellowed fragment of bone. "I think it's a fang," she muttered. "Or part of one. Pepper did you…?"

Pepper shook her head. "I didn't know it was there. Why would there be a tooth in my bracelet?"

"A fang," Jo corrected. "See the serration down this edge? Most animal fangs don't have that."

"What would?"

Jo gave her a reluctant look, like she knew Pepper wouldn't like the answer. "A werewolf," she admitted softly.

Pepper thought she might be sick again. "So – so someone killed a werewolf and – and put that tooth – fang – in my bracelet."

Jo shook her head. "There's no such thing as a dead werewolf," she said, and Pepper could read the guilt and horror on her friend's face in the tightening of Jo's eyes, the slight quiver in her gunhand, "just a dead person who used to be one." Jo swallowed. "Someone – my money's on Gordon – found a werewolf during a full moon, trapped them and then retrained them strongly enough to rip this out of their mouth."

"Why?" Pepper whispered.

"He thought you were a skinwalker, or a werewolf, right? Well, there's an old piece of lore about being able to control the changes of a shape-changer by using the fang of one in a spell, since skinwalkers and werewolves and a whole bunch of others use their bite to change others."

Pepper frowned. "But…it didn't work. I mean I can change just fine, and I –" Something suddenly dawned on her. "Oh _crap_."

Jo raised her eyebrows questioningly. "What?"

"I've been sick," Pepper said, cursing herself for not thinking of it sooner. "I've been desperate to change all the time and feverish and ill when I can't… Maybe the spell was working, but working wrong."

"Or maybe it was working just fine, but because you're not a skinwalker or a werewolf, your body was trying to fight it," Jo suggested.

Pepper was quiet for a moment. Then she said, voice very small, "Do you think it might have set off that – that guy – the werewolf? I mean it's not the full moon yet…"

Jo nodded. "It's possible," she murmured, turning the fang over in her fingers, examining it. "I mean, screwed up spellwork isn't like screwing up a cake or whatever. You can't predict how it'll go wrong; that's why messing with magic is so dangerous. Either way," she added, "we've got to do something with this."

"We can do something with it?"

"Yup." She reached down and pulled something out of what Pepper now knew to be the weapons duffle. "This should help."

It was small box – just big enough for a deck of card – made out of wood the color of warm honey. There was a design burnt into the lid; a stylized hand with a palm full of stars and Hebrew. When Jo lifted it Pepper saw that the box was filled with loose rock salt. The smell that rose from it reminded her of the sea, but was also strangely sweet.

"What is it?" Pepper asked.

"A hex box. Uncle Shawn gave me this one," Jo told her, digging a short length of red ribbon out of the rock salt. "The pattern on the lid is the Hand of Hamsa, to ward off ill intent." Next, she wrapped the fang fragment in the ribbon and nestled it into the salt. "The salt is for purity, and this –" she held up one of the larger white chunks – "is Balm of Gilead resin, for healing and protection."

"And by putting the fang in there…?"

"We're counteracting Gordon's spell, until we can find a way to undo it completely anyway."

Pepper watched Jo stash the box in the glove compartment.

"Jo," she murmured, "how're we going to break the spell?"

Her companion looked grim as she pulled a map out the driver's door pocket and began searching.

"We're not," she said, "but I know someone who can."

* * *

When the scalpel blade finally came loose from its place inside the seam of his shirt, Gordon thought his smile would give it away, but his jaw was so swollen it turned out Connolly missed it.

When the last strand of the rope around his wrists gave, he thought his cry of joy would give him away, but Connolly mistook it for pain.

But when he launched himself from the chair they had put him in and tore into his interrogator's side with the pliers he had been threatened with so many times…

…this time, Connolly knew he was smiling.

* * *

Dean's pre-full-moon hype combined with his usual maniac driving meant that they hit Nebraska at dawn and got to Harvelle's Roadhouse just in time for breakfast.

On the outside, it looked like every other dive he and Dean had hit up looking to scam a game of pool or let Dean card-shark his way through a poker match. The weatherboarding had that grayed-out look that old wood gets over time and there was a deep layer of dust on the windows, although Sam could just see a few unlit neon beer lights through them and 'closed sign' glaring back at them in the glass pane in the front door.

What was evidently a sort of informal parking lot was empty except for a red El Camino and a black motorcycle. Dean drew the Impala to a stop beside the El Camino and the two of them climbed out, eyeing their surroundings with healthy wariness.

"Place looks deserted…" Sam said.

"Yeah, well, looks can be deceiving," Dean muttered.

The full moon was coming at them at a rate of knots and Sam had a feeling his brother was missing being back in Eclipse River with the rest of the pack. The pair of them approached the Roadhouse, booted feet near silent in the dust. As they got closer, Sam paused by the bike.

"Harley-Davidson cruiser," he murmured, fingers brushing the black finish and leaving two shiny stripes in the road-dust coating it. "Softail Heritage. Wonder why the badges are missing. What?" he added, catching Dean's faintly incredulous look.

"Just never pegged you for an HD fan, is all."

Sam's eyebrows went up. "Yeah?"

"Yeah, figured you'd be more along the lines of a nice Vespa, y'know?"

Sam scowled at him. Dean grinned back.

"Whatever," the younger Winchester grumbled. "My first roommate at Stanford had one. I used to borrow it sometimes. That and the guy just would not shut up about it. So annoying." This time it was Sam's turn to grin. "Kinda like you and the Impala, actually."

"Hey!"

Sam snickered, glancing down at the bike again…and paused. "Dean."

"What?"

Sam pointed to a design embroidered in deep green, almost hidden against the black of the bike's leather saddle bags; a stylized hand, perfectly symmetrical, with a Star of David in its palm.

"I know that," Dean said, "it's a…a…oh, come on, I know this…a Hand of Miriam!"

Sam nodded, not taking his eyes from it. "Also known a as the Hand of Hamsa. It's an Islamic protection symbol."

Dean frowned. "Why would someone have this on their bike?"

"Well, either they're Islamic…"

"Or they're a hunter." Dean looked with renewed interest at the El Camino. "Man, Dad wasn't kidding about this being a stop for other hunters. I'll bet you anything that Camino's got a hidden compartment somewhere just full of –"

There was the crash-and-tinkle of breaking glass from inside the Roadhouse and both young men were in combat crouches and reaching for their guns before the noise had finished.

"Jesus fuck, Ellen, that hurt!" a man's voice yelled, Scottish brogue broad and angry.

"Nut up and shut up," a woman barked back in a whiskey-rough contralto. "It's your own damn fault. I _told_ you not to move."

The man didn't retaliate, so much as grumble out a continuous flow of rather creative swearing. The Winchesters exchanged looks.

"Ellen, d'ya think?" Sam whispered.

"Sure sounds like a woman who'd shoot Dad."

"Still going in?"

"Well, if they've got a lead, we've gotta."

They made their way to the front door.

"You first," said Dean.

"What! Why?"

"You're the cute-n-harmless looking one."

"I'm taller than you!"

"And yet," Dean said, grinning again.

Sam favored his brother with a look of extreme prejudice, but opened the Roadhouse's door and cautiously put his head round.

"Uh, hello?"

There were two figures at the bar; a man sitting shirtless on one of the barstools with his bare back to Sam and glass tumbler clenched in his fist. His head was bent so far towards the bar's top that Sam could only just see the dark brown hair salted with grey that curled against the guy's sweating neck. Even from here though, the blood was very clear, on his skin and the waistband of his jeans.

The woman next to him was doing her best to wipe it away with an equally blood-stained towel. She wore latex gloves that made an odd contrast with her flannel shirt and patched jeans. Her mane of brassy hair was pulled back in a rough ponytail and when she looked over at Sam he saw that she was still beautiful despite the lines bracketing her mouth and eyes, and the shadows in her face that spoke of worry and sleeplessness.

"We're closed," she told him, voice the very definition of 'no-nonsense.'

"Uh, yeah, I saw that," Sam said. "But see, we came for help…"

"I only see one of you," the woman remarked dryly, finally getting the last of the blood off the guy's side and beginning to apply bandages. Sam could see fresh stitches there; neat black zigzagging lines across his skin.

"That's 'cause my brother's using me as a human shield," he said, just as dryly.

"Hey!" Dean said from behind him and deliberately pushed the door all the way open. "I was not! I just thought we should make a good impression is all."

Sam smiled, hopefully in a way that was sweet and endearing. "As I said, we're looking for help. See, a friend of ours has gone missing, and we think they might have come by here."

The woman's dark eyes focused on them with raptor-intensity and the man looked over his grazed shoulder, the single eye visible to the young men gleaming in the low light like a gimlet.

"That a fact?" the woman said softly.

"Well, yeah," Sam said, beginning to feel a little…exposed. "Ah, are you Ellen? Ellen Harvelle?"

Her eyes narrowed. "I am. And you are?"

"I'm Sam, and this is my brother, Dean."

Ellen and the man exchanged quick incredulous looks, eyebrows raised.

"Now I've seen everything," the man muttered.

"Sam and Dean _Winchester_?" Ellen asked.

"Oh, God," said Dean. "We're going to get shot, aren't we?"

* * *

As it turned out, Ellen didn't shoot them.

Instead, she invited them in, introduced her friend Shawn Connolly, and shouted at the door that disappeared into the back for someone called 'Ash'.

Ash looked like he should've been born two decades ago and toured with Lynyrd Skynyrd. He handed both Winchesters a beer then grabbed one for himself and disappeared out back again, mullet wagging behind him.

"Hey," Dean called to him as he went, "dig the haircut, dude."

Ash gave him a look like, 'of course you do'.

"Business up front," he told them, fluffing his hair, "party in the back."

The door swung shut and seconds later – _no shit_ – Lynyrd Skynyrd started up somewhere behind it.

"Where'd you find him?" Sam asked Ellen as she finished bandaging Shawn's side.

"MIT," Ellen returned with aplomb to spare.

Dean came dangerously close to choking on his beer. "Seriously?"

Ellen just smiled, even more enigmatically than Dad, if that were possible, and pulled her gloves off with a snap as she rounded the bar. She pitched them into the bin under the sink and pouring Shawn another shot, before handing him his shirt back.

As he slipped it on, careful of his stitched side, Sam got a glimpse of a tattoo on his chest, over his heart. The Hand of Hamsa again, this time in black ink…

"So, what brings you boys by my bar?" Ellen asked. "You said you were looking for a friend…?"

"Yeah," Dean said. "Went missing 'bout two weeks ago and most of the leads we had have gone cold. Best one we got is this place."

"How d'ya figure?"

"Pepper was taken from a bus stop just outside her home town," Sam explained, voice low. "There were traces of colloidal silver there…we think she got mistaken for a shapeshifter and kidnapped."

"By a hunter?" Shawn asked, doing his own quick exchanged of looks with Ellen.

"Yeah."

"Okay," the elder hunter said. "_Now_ I've seen everything. Boys, the bastard you want is Gordon Walker."

Dean frowned. "I don't know that name. Who is he?"

"An asshole," Ellen said flatly. "And you're right; he's convinced your friend is a shapeshifter, or some kind of supernatural beastie anyway. He was a little confused towards the end there."

Both young men stared.

"Wait…towards the _end_…you killed him?"

"No," Shawn growled, "but I wish I had."

"We don't have a great history with Gordon," Ellen explained. "He almost got my girl Jo killed a few years back and I promised him a world of hurt if he ever came back here again. 'Bout five days ago he had the gall to show up in my bar…so I had Shawn here and Jake Reilly put him in the walk-in fridge we use as a holding room."

"I'm sorry, run that past me again," Dean put in, "you put him in a _fridge_?"

"It's turned off," Ellen reassured him. "Anyway about the same time as we were seeing to Gordon, Jo must have come across your girl in his car and made off with her. As far as we can tell the pair of them are still on the road, hiding out."

"And you know this how…?"

"Joey's been emailing Ash on some special secure account," Shawn put in, pushing his glass towards Ellen, who obligingly topped him up. He knocked back the shot and snarled, "I shoulda just put his eyes out and left the bastard to rot."

"Uh, you mean Gordon?"

"Aye." That brogue was getting broader by the minute. "Once we knew about the girl we tried to find out where he got her, see if we couldn't contact her folk to help her, but he wouldn't tell us and wouldn't shut up about going after her. Said she was a monster and a danger to Joey. That bastard."

Dean was scowling. "I'll second that," he muttered. "If anyone's the predator here, it's him; Pepper's seventeen, for fuck's sake. She's sheltered and naïve and –"

"And we _have_ to find her," Sam finished for him, voice low but earnest.

"Is he still in there?" Dean asked. "The fridge, I mean."

Shawn snarled, actually snarled, "No. I was questioning him, and I got sloppy. He got loose and came at me with my own damn…weapon. Last we saw of him was dust cloud disappearing down the road on _my fucking Harley_."

The man looked in danger of crushing the shot glass in his fist.

Sam felt like he might be taking his life in his hands when he hesitantly asked, "Wait, so the one out front, that's not yours?"

Shawn gave him the stink eye. "What gave you that idea?"

"Well, your tattoo – the Hand of Hamsa – it's the same as the one on the bike."

"It's not Shawn's," Ellen said softly. "It's Jo's. I think, if your girl hadn't been in a bad way, she would've taken off on her bike instead of in the Bronco."

Dean gave her an intent look. "Do you know if the girls are okay?"

Ellen smiled. "You mean do we know if _your_ girl's okay? They both are, far as we know. Jo emails Ash, and she mentioned – Pepper was it? – she mentioned Pepper calling home once."

Sam was frowning thoughtfully to himself. One phone call and secure email accounts…they certainly weren't taking any risks…

"Dude," Dean said, prodding the leg of his barstool with one foot, "you've got your geek face on and I can hear the gears moving in your big college freak brain. What's going on in there?"

"I'm just wondering…they're being really careful." He looked a question first at Ellen, then at Shawn. "I mean Gordon sounds like a Grade A asshole, but he's one guy…"

There was a pause and both hunter and bartender looked grim and vexed by turned. Shawn's mouth had flattened into a thin line.

"The caution's warranted," he told them. "Gordon's been…I don't know. Too good at the job, y'know? He's one hell of hunter, but for the past year or so we've been hearing about some of the hunts he's gotten a hold of…and it's like he was guided there.

"Like someone's been feeding him information."

* * *

**AN2:** Oooh, intrigue! Or, at least, my attempt at it. Anyway, this feedback whore needs feeding! Tell me how ya FEEL, baby!


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